Wikipedia:Don't delete the main page

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Screenshot of the error messages received seen when logged out. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Permission error (Main Page). You do not have permission to delete this page, for the following reasons: 1) The action you have requested is limited to users in the group: Administrators. 2) You cannot delete or move the main page. [highlighted in red] 3) You cannot delete this page because it has been protected.
The new restriction put in place to prevent this from happening again, highlighted in red.

The Main Page has been deleted 16 times since it was created. Some deletions resulted from a mistake or misunderstanding, while others were caused by the involved administrators' accounts being compromised. Following these incidents, the page now enjoys a sui generis immunity to deletion in the software.[1][2] If someone, including admins, tries to delete it, they will receive the message: "You cannot delete or move the main page.".

Examples

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Just the fact that you can push the button doesn't mean you should.

The first time the Main Page was deleted was on 22:42, 1 November, 2005, just seven minutes after the page's move to Hauturu/Little Barrier Island (now a redirect to Little Barrier Island) by a admin. The admin was apparently teaching a woman how a wiki works.[3]

One administrator was discussing the deletion of the main page in IRC and asked if the technical ability to delete pages with over 5,000 revisions, like the Main Page, had ever been re-enabled. Another administator jokingly commented that he had tested it and found that the main page still couldn't be deleted. The first admin thought he would test it for himself. The Main Page got deleted.[4]

As honored in the village stocks, this succeeds the admin who locked the servers for half an hour by deleting the Sandbox, necessitating the restriction of deletions for pages with over 5,000 edits. It is followed by the editor who used a unapproved bot to add 1,200 useless edits to the Main Page, hoping to bring it up to the 5000-edit level where it would not be deletable.

The last time the main page was deleted was on 01:11, 4 February, 2008 by East718. The main page hasn't been deleted since then, as it became impossible to delete it.[5]

An example of an administrator's account being compromised is the deletion as of 05:08, December 8, 2007, which resulted in a desysopping. The account was apparently used by a relative after the admin failed to log off, and the incidents as of May 7, 2007 were the result of a password hack.

Even non-English main pages that failed to reach 5000 edits have been deleted. For example, A Chinese Wikipedia administrator, after seeing a discussion, attempted to delete the Chinese main page using Twinkle, but because Twinkle directly requested the deletion via the user token, the Chinese Main page was deleted.

See also

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References

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